Our articles try to explain specialist words where they appear, but a single reference page is handy when the same term turns up again weeks later. The definitions below are deliberately brief and general; individual articles go into more depth.
Materials and manufacturing
- Polymer
- A substance built from long chains of repeating molecular units. Plastics, rubbers and many natural materials such as cellulose are polymers.
- Thermoplastic
- A polymer that softens when heated and hardens again on cooling, so it can be reshaped and, in principle, reprocessed.
- Thermoset
- A polymer that cures into a fixed, cross-linked structure. Once set, heating it again will not melt it back into a workable form.
- Injection moulding
- A process that forces molten material into a closed mould, where it cools into a finished shape. It suits large runs of identical parts.
- Extrusion
- Pushing softened material through a shaped opening to make continuous profiles such as pipes, film or window frames.
- Additive manufacturing
- Building an object layer by layer from a digital model, commonly known as 3D printing.
- Lightweighting
- Redesigning a part or product so it uses less mass while still doing its job, often to save energy in transport.
Technology
- Bandwidth
- The amount of data a connection can carry in a given time. Higher bandwidth allows sharper video or quicker downloads.
- Latency
- The delay between a request and the response. It matters most for live video, gaming and anything interactive.
- Codec
- Software or hardware that compresses and decompresses audio or video so it can be stored and streamed efficiently.
- Machine learning
- A family of methods in which software improves at a task by finding patterns in example data rather than following hand-written rules alone.
- Retrieval-augmented generation
- An approach in which a text-generating system first looks up relevant documents and then bases its answer on them.
Business and property
- Cash flow
- The timing of money coming into and going out of a business. A profitable company can still struggle if payments arrive late.
- Invoice factoring
- Selling unpaid invoices to a third party at a discount in exchange for receiving most of the money sooner.
- Comparative market analysis
- An estimate of a property's value based on recent sales of similar homes nearby.
- Compound growth
- Growth in which each period's gain is added to the base, so later gains are calculated on a larger figure.
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Vocabulary
Terms that come up often
Short definitions for words you will meet across our technology, materials and business coverage.
- Polymer
- A material made of long chains of repeating molecular units; plastics are one example.
- Extrusion
- Forcing softened material through a shaped die to produce continuous profiles such as pipe or film.
- Latency
- The delay between sending a request and receiving a response over a network.
- Codec
- A method for compressing and decompressing audio or video so it can be stored or streamed efficiently.
- Cash flow
- The timing of money entering and leaving a business, separate from whether it is profitable.
- Lightweighting
- Redesigning a part to use less mass while still meeting its performance requirements.